The need for increased data throughput and reliability has ushered a rapid advance in the development of next generation wireless networking technologies. One example of this rapid advance is illustrated within the IEEE 802.11 family of wireless local area network (WLAN) standards. To avoid fragmentation of the market with a proliferation of incompatible standards, a design goal for subsequent iterations of the 802.11 standard is that compatible devices be backward compatible with prior generation, or legacy, devices.
Illustratively, there is a requirement in the evolving next generation high-throughput (HT) WLAN (802.11n) standard that compatible devices be able to operate concurrently with the prior generation, 802.11a or 0.11 g devices in the same channel. One suggested solution is to use a rotated (BPSK) modulation, or a quadrature BPSK (Q-BPSK) for a 1st HT signal field of a HT WLAN packet. It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that differentiating between a BPSK packet rotated by ninety-degrees (90°) and a packet modulated using 16-QAM may be difficult when the receiver suffers a poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). As such, the proposed solution may not be robust to delivered guaranteed performance under all network conditions.